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The Fearless Dating Course - Mark Manson

The Fearless Dating Course - Mark Manson

The Fearless Dating Course is built upon the same principles, and is designed to be more of a practical blueprint to achieve that success. The way it works is there are six video lessons that you need to watch in order, and after you complete them you have the choice of going onto either the approaching module or the sexuality module. For most guys, it'll be a good idea to start with the approach module. However if you feel confident cold approaching women and already have plenty of experience with this, you might want to skip ahead to the sexuality module.

You'll be asked to complete an exercise at the end of each lesson throughout the course before you move on to the next lesson. Sometimes it'll be something you can complete then and there, such as writing down your goals for the course, but as it gets to the more practical lessons you'll need to go out and interact with women to complete the exercises.
The Inferiority Gap and Performance Based Pickup

You'll be exposed to a lot of deep concepts at the start of the course, and you'll be forced to confront a number of issues and limiting beliefs you may have. Mark talks about fear and anxiety, and how they hold men back from getting the results with women they truly desire. So throughout the course you're going to have to be honest with yourself and look at your biggest fears and your past experiences that may have led to them.

Mark introduces the idea that much of the dating advice on the market teaches performance based behaviour. Meaning that men are taught a series of actions to follow or lines to use so that a woman will find you attractive. He talks about how the main problem with this is the mindset behind it, which is the feeling that you are inferior and so need to compensate for that.

It's referred to here as the inferiority gap, where you see the woman as being above you, so you feel unworthy of here. So you adapt performance based game, trying to entertain women with the hope that she'll find you interesting enough that you can start to close that gap. One of the biggest problems with this is that if you do start to get some success with girls using these strategies, it simply reinforces the belief that you're inferior to the girl and need to act a certain way to make her like you.

There's a lot of truth to this, and it's a problem that was quite prevalent in the pickup community a number of years ago. Guys who were getting seemingly good results were developing a dependence on gimmicks and scripted lines, and weren't developing true confidence. So while there can be a time and a place to use certain routines, you don't want to fall into the trap where you believe you need them for a woman to find you attractive. And to have any kind of successful long term relationship with a woman, you can't be harboring feelings of inferiority and expect things to work out.

Mark goes on to describe how this inferiority gap typically leads men to develop either co-dependent or narcissistic behavior. This was interesting to listen to and contains a lot of truth, although it does tend to focus on the extremes and label men as either nice guys stuck in the friend zone or jerks who are sleeping with low self-esteem women. In reality, there are a lot of guys who fall somewhere along this spectrum and these mindsets have probably effected all of us at some point.